Military World War Ii

When England went to war against Hitler in 1939, it mobilized its entire military and industrial resources. But there was no place in that vast army for legendary stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, whose family was renowned for creating modern theatrical illusions. Maskelyne was determined to fight the Nazis using his only weapon: he intended to apply the techniques of popular magic to the battlefield. Initially ignored and ridiculed by the staid military leadership, he eventually cajoled his way into the Camouflage Corps.

Step back in time and experience World War II through the stories of the people who lived through it. Witness the horror of a prison camp march. Experience the sinking of a US warship. Watch a young French freedom fighter outsmart the Nazis. True Stories of World War II doesn’t just tell you the tales of war. It drops you into the thick of combat.

Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail - a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger.

For the Allied armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944, Rome was the prize that could only be won through a massive offensive. Military historian Mark Zuehlke returns to the Mediterranean theater of World War II with this gripping tribute to the Canadians who opened the way for the Allies to take Rome. The book is a fitting testament to the bravery of soldiers like the badly wounded Captain Pierre Potvin, who survived more than 30 hours alone on the battlefield.

Kenneth Macksey's highly regarded biography of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian gives clear insight into the mind and motives of the father of modern tank warfare. Panzer General shows Guderian as a man of ideas equipped with the ability to turn inspiration into reality. A master of strategy and tactics, he was the officer most responsible for creating blitzkrieg in World War II.

For decades, a major piece of World War II history has gone virtually unwritten. The war began in China two full years before Hitler invaded Poland, and China eventually became the fourth great ally, partner to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. Yet its drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue remains little known in the West.

At once a gripping depiction of men at war and a compelling story of redemption, Ghost Soldiers joins such landmark works as Flags of Our Fathers and The Greatest Generation Speaks in preserving the legacy of World War II for future generations.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.

It is difficult to find another soldier's story to equal Captain Darrell Watt's in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced. Even by the lofty standards of the SAS and Special Forces, one has to look far to find anyone who can match his record of resilience and valor in the face of such daunting odds and with resources so paltry. In the fight, he showed himself to be a military maestro. After 12 years in the cauldron of war, his cause slipped from beneath him, and Rhodesia gave way to Zimbabwe.

In February 1944, in one of the most astonishing battles of World War II, a ragtag collection of British clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews, managed to defeat a much larger and sophisticated contingent of some of the finest infantry in the Japanese army on their march toward India.

When Metcalfe boarded the C-47 which would drop him at Groesbeek Heights, just outside of Nijmegen, Holland, he was handed a box of twelve dozen condoms by an overconfident British lieutenant. He was to be among the first to jump into what should have been a picture-book meadow, free of German troops. Instead, it was defended by three German antiaircraft cannon emplacements. As he jumped into a hail of bullets and exploding shells, he watched his plane roll over and plummet into the ground.

Dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941 saw the opening onslaughts of Operation Barbarossa as German forces stormed forward into the Soviet Union. Few of them were to survive the five long years of bitter struggle. A posting to the Eastern Front during the Second World War was rightly regarded with dread by the German soldiers. They saw epic battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk, and yet it was a daily war of attrition which ultimately proved fatal for Hitler's ambition and the German military machine.

Twilight of the Gods is a riveting account of the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the US Navy won the largest naval battle in history; MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized. Toll's narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are gripping, but he also takes the listener into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo.

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.

It is well known that World War I was kicked off by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The world superpowers engaged in the bloodiest conflict in history at that time, with millions of casualties on either side. World War I transformed the socio-political landscape of the early 20th century and shaped the lives of countless people for decades to come.

Recruited by the US Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of codebreaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.

When Aline Griffith was born in Pearl River, New York, in 1923, one might have guessed from her exceptional beauty that a career as an actress or model might be in her future. Few would have imagined that twenty-one years later, she would find herself in Spain as a deep-cover OSS agent, infiltrating the highest levels of Spanish society, or that five years later still, she would marry a Spanish grandee and become one of the most watched, most admired, most fascinating women of international society. This is the story of Aline, Countess of Romanones, a story of courage, beauty and success that is far more exciting than any fictionalized thriller.

On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool.

Marsh Vincent, Mick McCarty, and Tommy Lewis were inseparable friends during their naval academy years, each man in love with the beautiful, unattainable Glory Hawthorne. Only Tommy wins her heart and marries Glory after graduation. Different skills set the three men on separate paths in the Navy, but they are all forever changed by the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.

Glory, now Tommy’s widow, is a tough Navy nurse still grieving her loss while trying to save lives at the Pearl Harbor naval hospital.

Filip Müller came to Auschwitz with one of the earliest transports from Slovakia in April 1942 and began working in the gassing installations and crematoria in May. He was still alive when the gassings ceased in November 1944. He saw millions come and disappear; by sheer luck he survived. Müller is neither a historian nor a psychologist; he is a source - one of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it. Eyewitness Auschwitz is one of the key documents of the Holocaust.